Veronika Slowikowska and Kyle Chase are doing a bit. To be fair, they are known for doing bits. Within the container of their Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment, they play a pair of roommates — Slowikowska the kooky one, Chase the killjoy — who are also artists in New York City. To a certain subset of people on the internet, the specific angle of their shared kitchen and living room has become as famous as the Friends set.

The difference is that, here and now, they’re out of their fish bowl, dumped into a studio in Chinatown on an early-June afternoon. Slowikowska, a tiny, indefatigable (although some of that is the caffeine) brunette, arrived in teeny denim shorts and Margiela Tabi ballet flats — “they were a gift,” she says, adding adroitly, “to myself” — while Chase, a tall, sweet-natured presence with powerful eyebrows, walked in wearing a vintage T-shirt and Our Legacy denim. (He is, he confirms, a frequent customer at Ven. Space.)

And now everyone on set is watching them record one of their viral comedy videos in real time, witnessing every minute note and adjustment that goes into the making of a 90-second clip. “Sometimes it’s two takes; sometimes it’s 40,” Slowikowska says. She’s joking, but she’s also not.

“Let’s pan here,” she says, directing the cameraperson.

“And let’s just go quicker,” she tells Chase. “Instead of dragging it, Kyle, let’s just go. One more pan down, I walk away, and that’s it.”

In the end, it’s closer to five takes. And Slowikowska and Chase get what they want: Everyone in the room is wildly entertained.

By now, most of us are familiar with the internet comedy cringe kids: the young comedians who raked in followers during the COVID-19 pandemic, among them Grace Kuhlenschmidt and the comedy group Please Don’t Destroy. Slowikowska, 29, and Chase, 30, aren’t exactly that; they started blowing up well after lockdown. But their stripped-down style and simple dynamic — also informed by their third creative partner, Michael Rees, 30 — recalls a time when all that was available was a room, a couch, and an iPhone camera.

They started posting consistently to Slowikowska’s Instagram page about two years ago. Often, the videos go like this: Slowikowska’s character, Veronika, does something off the wall, such as walking into the kitchen (in a pair of Online Ceramics basketball shorts) and declaring that she’s “done” using her looks to make money. Then, Chase’s character, Kyle, tries to talk her off a ledge in an exasperated tone. It’s a sort of Amelia Bedelia–style situational ridiculousness that works because Veronika is simultaneously so irritating and so loveable.

With each successive video, Slowikowska and Chase also found themselves unwittingly creating a self-contained universe. Their followers — and there were many, thousands right off the bat — began to refer to the amalgamation of their in-jokes simply as “The Lore.” It helped that they were willing to try pretty much anything. “I think I have something wrong with me in that I don’t really have a button that’s like, ‘Don’t post that,’” Slowikowska says. “Even when I started, I was willing to fail. People are afraid. And for me, it’s the internet. It’s forever, but it’s not. No one gives a shit.”

As things have picked up, Slowikowska has expanded, appearing recently on the Netflix sitcom Tires and the Natasha Lyonne–led series Poker Face. She shot an ad for Free People, she and Chase both did a short for Mountain Dew, and their apartment got a tasteful upgrade thanks to a West Elm deal. (“I know I shouldn’t support advertising,” but “I love it,” Slowikowska says. “I’m like, ‘Fuck it. I was poor for so long.’”) Earlier this month, news broke that she would join the cast of Saturday Night Live. Now, people are more likely to encounter their videos as standalone skits, although the original fans are still around. One early commenter, a 40-something guy from Boston, has even become a sort-of friend.

They’re slowly becoming more deliberate with how they engage in their art. If the early days were like doing “a line of coke,” per Slowikowska — all instant gratification, no lasting effect — these days are more like microdosing psilocybin: entering their thirties, inching closer to their final forms, figuring out how to make this thing last.

The road here was surprisingly long, filled with DM slides, long-distance phone calls, and some light circumnavigation of immigration authorities. Slowikowska grew up in a small town in northern Ontario where she attended performing arts schools. Around age 20, she started getting into the comedy community in Toronto, performing live eight times a week. Then the pandemic hit, and she decided something had to shift. “I had $8,000 Canadian dollars, and I moved to LA and was like, ‘I’m just going to try it,’” she says. She was living there more or less full-time, traveling back to Canada every six months to renew her visa. She started posting videos to TikTok and Instagram, which is where Chase found her.

He’d seen a video of Slowikowska playing basketball — “not really shooting hoops, but just throwing the basketball at the hoop,” Chase says, and “explaining America’s Funniest Home Videos as if she just heard about it for the first time.” He assumed she was in Brooklyn, so he followed her. (He and Rees had moved from LA to New York together to pursue comedy.) Slowikowska freaked out. “I was like, ‘The hottest guy ever just followed me on Instagram,’” she says. “‘Oh my god. What’s going to happen?’”

What happened is that Chase DM’d her. He and Rees were looking to cast a female lead in a short film, and they were big fans of hers. Would she be interested? She’d relocated to New York for the moment, and in the summer of 2022, the three of them met for a drink. It turned out they shared a lot of references: Comedy Bang! Bang! and Nirvanna the Band the Show, Donald Glover and Reggie Watts, and the whole aesthetic of SNL in 2012 and 2013. That night, “it sounds so stupid, but we just instantly clicked,” Slowikowska says. “It felt like we were creative soulmates.”

So, they decided to work on the movie together. Except by Slowikowska’s last day in New York, they still hadn’t shot anything. They had a come-to-Jesus moment in which Slowikowska offered to sleep on Rees and Chase’s couch for two more nights — on the condition they all buckle down and get some footage. For those two days, they worked like crazy. “As soon as we started shooting, I could feel the pressure of working with someone who was better at acting than I was,” Chase says. “But also, I work really well off of other people’s energy. Our energies were just vibrating, and we made this thing in a night.”

Back in Canada, Slowikowska booked a few projects, which gave her the time and money to think about where she wanted to end up permanently. Meanwhile, she and Chase were in constant communication. She decided to move to New York to work with him and Rees full-time. “I had a visa for a short amount of time, and I was like, ‘Let me just go crazy,’” Slowikowska says. “‘Let’s work so hard it’s stupid, and let’s just see.’”

Early on, she went over to Rees and Chase’s apartment with three video ideas, all of which they shot. When they posted them, all three went bonkers. “It was really fun. And it was instant,” Slowikowska recalls. “It was our little drug in a way. That’s how it felt.”

They shot to popularity so fast that one of the first times they were recognized out in the world was in late 2023 — just a couple of months after they’d started sharing videos. It was raining, and Chase, Slowikowska, and Rees were hungover, walking around Greenpoint looking for bagels. A girl approached them, complimented their work, and asked to take a picture with Slowikowska. It was, Chase says, a bit of an out-of-body experience. It was also when they knew they had something that could really take off.

From the beginning, there was the dynamic of Chase as the lowkey roommate and Slowikowska as the over-the-top weirdo, which functioned well as the framework for an idea. “You can take any scenario and plug these two characters into it and say, ‘How does Kyle react to this? How does Veronika react to this?’” Chase says. “‘And when you put that together, what does it look like?’” He calls their characters “heightened” versions of their real-life counterparts — same, same, but different.

Of course, some people have trouble telling the difference. “A lot of people we see on the street or at coffee shops think Veronika in real life is going to be how she is in the videos,” Chase says. “They don’t know it’s a bit.”

The ultimate bit might be Chase and Slowikowska’s relationship. Their characters have a romantic arc: Veronika is secretly in love with Kyle, and any mention of another woman in Kyle’s life only dials up her nuttiness. Countless fans are also rooting for Chase and Slowikowska to get together in real life — something they play on by posting videos of themselves kissing on the subway platform, for instance, or compilations of several years’ worth of couple-y photos with the caption “my person <3.” They appeared in Cosmopolitan as a couple, only for their online characters to turn that into a farce. All this has made it virtually impossible to tell what’s real and what isn’t. “They could get married and I still wouldn’t be able to tell if it was a bit,” one commenter wrote.

Chase enjoys the ambiguity. “I don’t want to give away too much,” he says, “but we like to blur the line between what’s happening online versus what’s actually happening in our lives. It’s fun to post something and to have people not know if it’s real. Especially if it is real, but it’s being posted as if it’s a bit. “And maybe it’s the Capricorn in me,” he adds, “but that’s nobody else’s business.”

Slowikowska echoes him and talks about the need to stay crushable. “If a comedian who I have a crush on is dating someone, I’m like, ‘Eh, whatever,’” she says. “But if they’re not, it’s like, ‘Something is possible.’” She does mention that Chase takes all her thirst traps, which are dotted throughout her feed and which present her in a markedly different light than the videos they record together. By now, he’s familiar with her best angles. “He’s like, ‘Hey, a little higher,’” Slowikowska says. “He knows.”

She adds, “I’m not afraid to be ugly, and I feel funniest when I’m ugly. But I love a little thirst trap.”

There are other little clues about their real-life relationship status. Slowikowska mentions that she and Chase live in apartments across the hall from each other — a dream scenario for any New York couple. But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. Creative relationships can get fraught, even if the people involved aren’t sleeping together.

With this in mind, I ask Slowikowska — who, for what it’s worth, does melt at the mention of Chase, calling him “so great” and glancing sweetly in his direction — what will happen if they break up. Will they keep posting videos? How does their trajectory change? Who gets Rees in the divorce? She tells me confidently that the question doesn’t apply. “We won’t,” she says. “We’re in it for life.”